1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to memories, and more particularly to wordline driver leakage reduction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many memory arrays suffer from the effects of current leakage. Typically, aside from the array bit cells, the next largest leakage current contributors are the wordline drivers. Because each wordline driver may be used to drive several bit cells it typically incorporate a large p-type transistor in the final inverter driver stage.
There are conventional techniques to try to reduce the wordline driver leakage. While some of the techniques have provided some reduction in leakage current, they still suffer from drawbacks. For example, one conventional technique uses level shifters to reduce the voltage used to power the peripheral circuits around the wordline drivers. This technique does reduce the leakage current of some of the peripheral circuits, but does not adequately address the leakage problems of the wordline drivers themselves. In addition level shifters increase area. Other approaches may utilize an inverter stage in the wordline driver that may be disabled when not in use. However, using this conventional approach may allow the wordline to inadvertently float to a logic level that could potentially allow data to be corrupted in the bit cells of the array.